Bramble Berry recently ran a full page advertisement in a national magazine. The full page did not come cheap. The ad ran but printed incorrectly. The design was … off. The ad looked odd. The ad didn’t look terrible, just wrong.
I phoned my rep and left a generic, “Something was wrong with our ad. Please call me.” The message was friendly, polite and to the point.
The phone message I got in return was defensive and arrogant. “You clearly submitted the ad incorrectly. In the future, we will require you to send out proofs for every single ad you want to run.”
I like the magazine so I decided to try to work this out via email since phone messages obviously weren’t working.
My designer swears she had two ad formats on the disk; the other magazine that ran the ad had a correct rendering of the ad. I’m not sure what to say except that I’m disappointed the ad looked so bad and I’m disappointed in the lack of options offered me.Your message leaves me feeling like you are blaming me, the customer, for the ad rendering issues.
I of course, love XYZ Magazine (who couldn’t?) but am disappointed at how this issue was handled.
This communication worked out much better. The magazine in question is running a (small) free ad in the next issue to compensate for the incorrect rendering in the original ad.However, I still might not do business with this company again for a few reasons:
1. Future ads will now be inconvenient to send. We can’t upload them to the FTP ad server. Now we need to submit a print out proof for each ad, via Fed Ex.
2. There was no effort made to address the underlying problem. The ad ran incorrectly. We submitted the ad correctly (blustery and defensive assertions to the contrary).
3. I don’t want to deal with testosterone driven, obtuse jerks. I like to work with people that admit mistakes and work to correct errors. Defensive blamers are a pain to interact with. Life is short. It’s good to surround yourself with people that are fair, decent and don’t cause you too much stress.
I’m still simmering on this issue and haven’t committed to any future ads with the magazine yet. They did make the mistake right by running a comp ad, gratis. But, it took more effort than I would have liked to get to that resolution.
If anyone has feedback or a shared experience that might help me out with whether I should run more ads with the magazine in question, please let me know. I’m very open to feedback on this issue.
